Is Capitalism Structurally Racist?

Capitalism and the Logic of Exploitation

Is capitalism structurally racist? Is racism a contingent byproduct of capitalism’s historical development, or is it embedded in the system’s core logic? These are not merely moral or philosophical questions. They strike at the heart of how we understand exploitation, accumulation, and inequality in the modern world. To answer them, we must look beyond surface narratives of progress and inclusion and examine the deeper structural mechanisms that reproduce racial domination within capitalist society.

Marx famously theorized capitalism as a system of exploitation. Stripped of independent access to the means of production, the proletariat must sell its labor power in order to survive. The crux of capitalist social relations lies in the fact that workers do not own the surplus value generated through their labor. That surplus accrues to the capitalist, who profits from the non-compensation of a portion of the worker’s labor time. Wage labor thus appears as a voluntary contract, but conceals an asymmetrical relation of domination.

Primitive Accumulation and Racial Hierarchies

Exploitation alone does not account for the full range of capitalist accumulation. Marx himself, particularly in the chapters on so-called “primitive accumulation,” recognized that violent expropriation, including enslavement, conquest, and dispossession, was foundational to the emergence of capitalist relations. This insight has been taken further by scholars like Cedric J. Robinson, who argued that capitalism did not emerge on a blank slate, but rather inherited and institutionalized racial hierarchies. In his seminal work Black Marxism (1983), Robinson coined the term racial capitalism to describe this fusion of capitalist development and racial domination.

Beyond Labor Markets: The Structural Role of Expropriation

To understand this entanglement, we must expand our analytical lens beyond labor markets to the historical and ongoing processes of expropriation—the seizure of land, labor, and life without equivalent exchange. These processes are not aberrations but structurally integral to capitalism’s global expansion. As Nancy Fraser puts it, capitalism rests not only on the exploitation of waged workers but also on the expropriation of unwaged, racialized, and colonized populations.

Historic Forms of Racialized Expropriation

Historically, this has taken the form of territorial conquest, land annexation, enslavement, forced labor, child abduction, and systemic sexual violence, especially in early capitalist accumulation. The Atlantic slave trade was not merely a moral atrocity but a fundamental engine of value production for European capital. Racial subjugation was encoded into the very structure of economic life: blackness as labor, whiteness as property.

Contemporary Mechanisms of Racialized Exploitation

In the modern era, these logics have not disappeared, they have morphed. The global supply chain is riddled with prison labor, often disproportionately extracted from racialized communities, particularly in the United States. Transnational sex trafficking continues to commodify women and girls in conditions of extreme precarity. Corporate land grabs in the Global South, such as large-scale acquisitions in Ethiopia’s Gambela region or palm oil expansion in Indonesia, displace indigenous and rural populations under the guise of climate-smart agriculture or carbon offset projects. In Kenya, pastoralist communities are evicted for reforestation schemes tied to carbon credit markets. In Bangladesh, climate-induced displacement funnels vulnerable populations into informal, low-wage urban labor markets.

Predatory debt structures and foreclosure policies continue to devastate communities of color from subprime mortgage crises in Black neighborhoods in the U.S. to austerity-driven IMF policies that gut public services in the Global South. In Puerto Rico, fiscal colonialism under U.S. federal oversight has forced school closures and pension cuts to repay hedge funds. These examples are not marginal, they are foundational to how capital reproduces itself by dispossessing racialized and peripheral populations.

Racism as a Technology of Expropriation

In this article, the term "racialized" does not refer narrowly to biological race or skin color. Rather, it denotes a broader social and political process by which groups of people are constructed as inferior, threatening, or expendable, based on markers such as ethnicity, religion, language, caste, nationality, or geography. As Stuart Hall articulated in his lecture Race: The Floating Signifier, race functions as a “floating signifier,” mobilized differently across contexts to justify hierarchy.

Racialization is not simply a matter of prejudice or identity. It is a structural logic of differentiation that underpins systems of accumulation, discipline, and dispossession. It is what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” In this sense, racial capitalism does not merely exploit existing differences. It produces them as part of its operational logic.

These patterns are not incidental. Racialized populations are systematically exposed to forms of unfreedom that are essential to capital accumulation but remain external to the formal labor market. These are not marginal injustices, they are central mechanisms. They demonstrate that capital does not rely solely on the exploitation of “free” labor but also on zones of expropriation, where legal personhood, political protection, and economic rights are selectively withdrawn.

The connection between capitalism and racism thus cannot be understood solely through the lens of discrimination or bias. Rather, racism functions as a technology of expropriation. It delineates who is exploitable under wage labor, and who can be dispossessed with impunity. In this sense, race is not simply a cultural construct, it is a structural ordering principle in the architecture of global capitalism.

Imperialism and the Global Architecture of Capitalism

Furthermore, imperial expansion is not an accident of capitalism but a condition of its possibility. As Giovanni Arrighi argued in The Long Twentieth Century (1994), the capitalist world-system has always been governed by hegemonic powers, states capable of enforcing property claims, stabilizing markets, and projecting force across borders. These powers, from early modern Europe to the contemporary United States, have invariably used racialized ideologies to justify conquest, colonization, and intervention.

This structure persists. The Palestinians under occupation, the mining-fueled violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and structural adjustment programs that trap entire regions in debt dependency illustrate how racialized global hierarchies continue to shape contemporary capital accumulation. Climate finance mechanisms risk perpetuating this logic: wealthy nations push “nature-based solutions” in the Global South, often masking dispossession under the banner of climate action.

If we take seriously the structural entanglement between capitalism and racial domination, then we must also rethink the boundaries of critique. A class-only analysis fails to capture how capital accumulation depends not just on wage labor but on the racialized violence of expropriation. The struggle against capitalism must therefore be simultaneously a struggle against racism, not as an adjunct issue, but as a central axis of transformation.

The Limits of Democracy and Law in Preventing Exploitation

Can democratic systems or just legal structures prevent exploitation? While democratic political systems and just legal frameworks are essential for protecting civil liberties and advancing social rights, they are insufficient to fully prevent exploitation within capitalism.

Democracies theoretically empower citizens to enact protective labor laws, anti-discrimination policies, and welfare programs. In practice, wealth and capital exert disproportionate influence over democratic institutions through lobbying, campaign financing, and control over media narratives.

As scholars like Nancy Fraser and Sheldon Wolin have shown, formal democracy can coexist with substantive economic oligarchy. Legal systems offer formal equality but often fail to address material inequality. Access to justice remains stratified, legal protections are inaccessible for many marginalized groups.

Postwar social democracies in Scandinavia achieved lower exploitation internally but often relied on externalized exploitation through global supply chains. The U.S. Civil Rights Movement secured legal rights but left economic racial disparities largely intact. Post-colonial nations gained legal sovereignty but remained ensnared in exploitative global economic structures.

Democracy and legal rights can mitigate exploitation’s worst effects but cannot eliminate it while systemic inequalities in property, capital, and global power persist.

In this context, struggles against racial capitalism must not only demand legal reform and democratic rights but also fundamentally confront the structures of accumulation and expropriation that underpin global capitalism itself.

To conclude, capitalism is not incidentally racist. It is structurally racialized. Its history is inseparable from imperial conquest, chattel slavery, and colonial plunder. Its present is maintained by racialized policing, debt, and dispossession. And its future will depend on whether these structural dynamics are confronted or further obscured under the veneer of market rationality and formal equality.

The Need for a New Vision Beyond Capitalism

Although this article has heavily criticized capitalism, I have never felt sympathy for the communist or socialist regimes humanity has experienced to date. Those systems, often claiming Marxist inspiration, in practice distorted what Marx theorized in his works. I consciously distance myself from those historical models. Yet, I believe it is imperative to grasp how Marx critiqued capitalism, not out of ideological loyalty, but out of a necessity to understand its weaknesses and structural contradictions. One does not have to be a Marxist to appreciate the analytical clarity Marx brought to the dynamics of exploitation, accumulation, and systemic inequality.

Understanding Marx today is essential to diagnosing the crises we face, but diagnosis alone is not enough. The world is in desperate need of a revised, renewed, and contextually adapted system, one that learns from past experiences rather than repeating them. Crafting such a system will be no easy task. It demands intensive and extensive deliberations, sustained through well-intentioned dialogue across disciplines, geographies, and histories. Only through this effort can we hope to imagine alternatives rooted not in dogma, but in the collective aspirations of humanity.